MEMORY NOTE 3 HOW TO

The Author's Note is a bit like stage directions in a screenplay, but you're telling the AI how to write instead of giving instructions to actors and directors. Here's an example where I introduced the setting, main conflict, and protagonist:Īuthor's note is inserted only a few lines above the new text, so it has an larger impact on the newly generated prose and current scene. A typical paragraph might be between 50-100 tokens, so I aim for around 200 tokens total (one tenth of the 2048 token budget with the Sigurd model). It's worth spending a few hundred tokens on this. You might even devote a paragraph to each. Use it to introduce the main theme(s) of your story, the broad strokes of the setting, central conflict(s), and protagonist. Think of Memory like the summary in the dust jacket of a book, or the back of a movie, or a Netflix menu. However, it's also the farthest away from the new text that is actively being generated, so it may have less obvious impact on current scene. Memory is inserted at the very top of what is sent to the AI, so it is the first thing that the AI sees every time you click Send. It may still work somewhat because the words are in proximity to one another, but the basic concept behind this technology is built around natural language, so it should usually be better to say 'The aliens are a vicious insectoid species' rather than 'Alien species: Insectoid'. I'm not convinced that strange formatting outside of the brackets is actually a good idea, despite some folks recommending it. Otherwise, it will just appear to the AI as one continuous block of text by default.

The square brackets trick (enclosing paragraphs in '') works pretty well for these, helping the AI distinguish background information from your main text. This is akin to how telling someone 'Don't think about sparkly unicorns' basically guarantees that they are immediately going to think about sparkly unicorns. Use positive assertions rather than negation: it is far more effective to say 'Bob is peaceful' rather than 'Bob is not violent'. The AI will have enough trouble keeping track of which character is which on it's own, and this will reinforce the associate between whatever you are describing and the qualities you want it to have. Repeat specific names or titles frequently, rather than using generic pronouns. For example, say a character is 'middle-aged' instead of '50 years old'. The AI does poorly with exact or quantitative details, so give it descriptive or qualitative information to work with. Similarly, in the actual story portion, use very descriptive language because the AI will reflect the level of writing you feed into it. Since these will be continually used throughout the story by the AI, it's worth taking some time to find colorful words, as that will influence the AI to use higher quality prose as well. However, that doesn't mean to use low quality language. For all these 'behind the scenes' functions, use concise, punchy language to pack as much clearly defined information into as few tokens as possible.

Memory note 3